Obese? No Welfare Check For You

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A conservative-led local council in England is mulling plans to cut welfare benefits if recipients are obese or deemed to be unhealthy. The council says it is a measured response to a pressing health care issue, while critics charge is it just another attack on welfare recipients.

Westminster Council, along with a local government-led think tank, says that it wants to take data that it collects through local peoples’ everyday activities, such as going to council-owned gym facilities and through routine medical evaluations, to determine whether those who are obese or live unhealthy lifestyles should have their welfare money threatened in order to give extra incentive and lift the burden of NHS costs from the wider public.

The report in question, called A Dose of Localism: the Role of Councils in Public Health, comes as England prepares to transfer, as of April, how it monitors responsibility for community and public health from the NHS to local authorities.

The proposals suggest that for general practitioners and local authorities to meet the financial challenges created by their new public health role, they will have to tackle growing obesity rates that continue to inch ever upward even while national budget cuts squeeze local authorities of their funds.

The suggestion to link benefit payments to claimants’ approach to their lifestyles has its origins in GPs having been given powers to prescribe health programs that involve exercise.

As such, the report suggests:

Relocalisation of council tax benefit and housing benefit combined with new technologies provide and opportunity for councils to embed financial incentives for behaviours that promote public health. The increasing use of smart cards for access to leisure facilities, for instance, provides councils with a significant amount of data on usage patterns. Where an exercise package is prescribed to a resident, housing and council tax benefit payments could be varied to reward or incentivise residents.

In effect, if claimants do not follow the advice of their doctors and continue to pursue an unhealthy lifestyle, they could see their state-funded welfare assistance cut.

A spokesperson for Westminster Council, stressing that this is just one among several proposals, termed this a “carrot and stick” approach.

A Measured Response to Obesity’s Serious Health Costs?

According to the latest edition of the Health Survey for England, it is estimated that 24% of men and 26% of women are obese, while 65% of men and 58% of women are either overweight or obese. Obesity is a known risk factor for a number of health problems including heart disease and increasing the risk of type-1 diabetes.

This comes as Diabetes UK publishes findings from its compiling of an international league table that suggests type-1 diabetes rates are unusually and seriously high among Britain’s children. The results show that 24.5 in every 100,000 UK children (those under 14) are diagnosed with the disease each year, compared with just 12.2 in every 100,000 in France. This puts the UK fifth in the highest figures table, only behind Finland, Sweden, Saudi Arabia and Norway.

To be clear, obesity rates and lifestyle choices are not thought to specifically account for this high rate, however rising obesity figures have been a cause of great concern for a number of years now, not just in terms of health but also in the monetary costs of providing medical assistance to the various and often aggressive problems obesity and being seriously overweight can cause.

The Department of Health estimates that there is a significant burden on the NHS with direct costs because of obesity set at around £5.1 billion per year.

Seen through this lens it may be an attractive idea for local governments to use their authority to ensure that benefit claimants are taking steps to correct lifestyle choices that could lead to obesity and therein save the nation a considerable sum of money.

However, there are other ways to look at this so-called “carrot and stick” approach that very much seem to put the emphasis on the stick rather than the carrot.

Fat Shaming and Shirking the Real Issue?

The logic of the proposal is that of the incentive: if benefit claimants want to receive their full payout and have been prescribed exercise programs to combat lifestyle related health issues they must adhere to that program.

However, critics warn this misses several points and is nothing but an excuse for a Conservative local government, who as a national party have always been critical of the welfare state, to claw back money to balance their budgets while demonizing the under-privileged.

British Medical Association GP committee chairman Dr Buckman, a GP in north London, called the proposals “some of the silliest things I’ve heard in a long time”.

“When I was first told about this I thought it was a joke,” he said.

He added: “The best way [councils] can intervene is to stop restaurants and fast-food chains providing the kind of food that make people put on weight, and interfere with the way foods are sold in shops.”

Obesity support organisation Big Matters spokeswoman Susannah Gilbert said: “It would be fairer to use the money to support people rather than to penalise people.

“Any plans for health should be holistic,” she added. “Some people have emotional issues to do with food.”

Indeed, the proposal seems at the very least to run the risk of accusations of nanny state-like cajoling that fails to tackle key problems like the (perceived) high price of healthy foods like vegetables and fruits, and the lack of preventative measures to stop the underprivileged from entering the spiral that leads them to poor health and potential obesity. Indeed, pulling out the safety net of their welfare benefits risks being seen as a callous act that fails to take into account that many welfare recipients, due to health reasons that may have in fact caused their obesity, cannot work and therefore rely on that money to live.

That said, the proposals have not been uniformly panned, with several groups suggesting that it is right that those who can help themselves should be encouraged to do so, but they have wanted that a blanket approach risks unduly burdening those with genuine health complaints.

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163 comments

To Dorlinda C. Did I understand you right? You approve the Japanese practice of keeping convicts behind bars if they can't read or write!!!!! But yet you approve people buying top of the line steaks and so on. You stated it was NONE OF MY BUSINESS how my hard earned tax dollars are spent. If you can't afford to feed your family and need food stamps than you can't afford to buy a porterhouse steak in the first place. PERIOD!!! My husband and I CAN AFFORD to buy a porterhouse steak but stick to a budget. You see. Our son is in law school and we don't depend on the government for handouts. Eight years of money out of my OWN pocket! Maybe you should think about that next time you are buying that porterhouse steak with my MONEY! IT"S ILLEGAL IN THIS COUNTRY. JUST IN CASE YOU DIDN'T FIGURE THAT OUT YET!

The comments about cheap and fattening food are fair. Also, more and more people are depending on the food banks to get by, where you cannot decide what you get.

I wonder why the poor must be punished for being fat, while it is ok is you are rich? The drain on the health service is the same. But it is quite amazing how many views people ha
ve on poor or unemployed people.

Where do we draw the line? Smoker? Skiers? Bad drivers? People who did not look before crossing the street? People with more than one child? They should probably have foreseen this crisis..

well said wayne L , i totally agree , not all obese people is down to food , some of it is in the geens , this time last yr , i was in a size 20 , and now im down to a size 12 , how i dont know , docs have done alsorts of tests , i eat rubbish and drink rubbish ( no booze tho ) . yet the weight has fallen off , i come from a long line of big women

Obesity is not just a question of diet and exercise. The issue involves access to healthy food, the way in which food is grown and processed, the aggressive marketing of foods high in fat and sugar. It is therefore unfair to directly penalize those who are obese

And Gysele v. is right not to judge.
Buying soda pop, cheap meats, cheetos etc. makes welfare money stretch further.
A bag of Cheetos will feed four people as a snack for less money than buying 5 lbs. of apples for example.
Buying milk is only possible if one has the total amount of required money in one's pocket.. Buying the same volume of soda pop is cheaper.
My biggest problem was people buying the small containers of laundry detergent when the giant economy size is SO much cheaper. Then I discovered that only having enough money for a small size container was a very compelling reason. One cannot write an IOU at the checkout.
I overheard a person telling their local politician that they had to make a decision about which to buy for their child - sanitary napkins or milk.
It is NOT a matter of knowing better - because (most) people on welfare DO know better. They just cannot afford to think about it.

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Steve Williams is a passionate supporter of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans (LGBT) rights, human rights, animal welfare and health care reform. He is a published novelist, poet and citizen journalist, and a scriptwriter for computer games, film and web serials. less